Friday, May 8, 2020

Finking Cap Club

Emmi Seppälä is a teacher friend of mine who runs the Finking Cap Club, a membership website for Finnish learners who want to learn Finnish grammar and practical language online. We made a little deal, and every time someone joins her club through this blog post, I will get a small percentage.

I'm very happy to promote Emmi's website because it's well made, full of useful material, and Emmi is a super nice lady!

Emmi has a lot of free material on YouTube and on Instagram, but this is what you'll get if you join her Finking Cap Club:

A growing collection of video and text tutorials with exercises. Finnish grammar is explained in English and with plenty of examples.

A growing collection on practical and authentic lessons on real-world Finnish (audio, video, text and images)

Please leave a comment, if you have something to ask about the Finking Cap Club!

Here's a message from Emmi:

Moi vaan kaikille! This is Emmi, an online Finnish instructor and a language enthusiast from Helsinki, Finland. Hanna invited me to introduce myself to her followers, and I’m delighted to be here!
I’m on the final stretch of my MA in English (with Finnish, French and teacher studies on the side) at the University of Helsinki. I got to this point after 8 years of living abroad. I always felt like there was no other option for me than to see the world as soon as I finished high school. So I left as soon as I finished high school, and I studied, worked and lived out of a suitcase occasionally - and it was fun, but eventually, I followed my heart and settled down here in Helsinki. I’m a small town girl, really, so Helsinki felt like a good compromise between wanting some peace and quiet while simultaneously wanting to be connected to the world outside of Finland. Thankfully, the online world enables me to connect with people from around the world now, which probably helped me to finally slow down and make a home somewhere.

Lately, Hanna and I have been musing about all the possibilities to help Finnish learners achieve their goals, and it’s been so inspiring to talk to someone who’s as excited about online teaching as I am. While learning Finnish involves a great deal of speaking the language in real life, there are so many things learners can do online to enrich their learning experience. I’ve lived the time when accessing the internet was not self-evident, which makes it all the more exciting that there are so many opportunities to improve your skills wherever you are.I’ve always been into languages but it wasn’t until I lived abroad that I realised how much I enjoyed helping other people make sense out of foreign languages. I also know what a struggle it is to try to communicate in a language you thought you mastered relatively well and a) struggle to find native speakers to help you learn and b) realise that everyday language has so much more variety and detail to it than you thought!So, I wanted to help people learn Finnish. And despite the former Emmi who was terrified of technology, I learned how to make videos, built a website and started creating online courses for Finnish learners. Now, I’m making use of my creative side and using more and more visuals in my courses: my own drawings, pictures of the real world… anything that will help YOU get those lightbulb moments!My membership site for Finnish learners, The Finking Cap Club, is not a language app - I make use of the Finnish language world around me (yep, I’m that crazy lady taking photos of a paper towel dispenser in a public WC because it gives me a juicy language topic to use in my materials!). I also use English as the medium in my online courses. This means that my courses suit someone who likes to learn Finnish structures and nuances in more detail. If you love comparing standard Finnish and the most common varieties of Finnish, I’ll help you with that, too. I also create grammar courses, and I link to them wherever I see the opportunity.
I hope to see you inside the Finking Cap Club. Good luck with your studies, wherever you are!Here’s a couple of fun Finnish expressions about laughing to brighten your day!